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Archive → April, 2014

Being a conservationist, I’m on a bunch of email lists about conservation, natural resources, environmental protection.

Why and how groups send emails decrying natural resource companies, while happily using those same resources, like oil, coal, and natural gas, is beyond comprehension.

Oil and gas companies serve a demand by consumers who want their cars to run, their stoves to cook.

Coal powered electricity is ubiquitous. It runs hospitals and schools, as well as your home and place of business.

Somehow, in a twisted way, the companies supplying the power are “bad,” and the consumers are off the hook. As if these companies operate in a vacuum.

Credibility suffers when you’ve got two or more standards for the same behavior. It’s sad because environmental quality is important. My request to conservatives is to not dismissively abandon the field of battle, and don’t let the far left define or frame the issue, either. And don’t let the leftist groups get away with demonization of companies the world depends upon, unless those same groups are willing to generate their own power and transportation fuels.

A “severance tax” on deep shale gas would be on top of, in addition to, the Capital Stock and Franchise Tax, an astronomical Corporate Net Income Tax, and the Act 13 Impact Fee that is collected from wells and distributed to hosting counties.

Adding an additional tax, no matter what you call it, is stupid. It’s bad public policy, it’s bad government. Tax-and-spend officials always like spending other people’s money. That’s the worst sort of government.

A severance tax could make sense if one or all of the other taxes and fees were eliminated. Then there’d be balance. That’s good public policy, good government.

If you want higher prices in your own house for many food items, grill gas, heating gas, etc. and you want to open up your own wallet, take out more money than you need to pay, and just donate it, OK. But don’t demand that everyone else also dig deeper into their wallets for their money to cover your bad ideas. The severance tax will be passed on to the public with higher costs for lots of things.

Rush Limbaugh is a hero. An outstanding analyst. And he takes clean air and water for granted. This frustrates me, because these two critical resources are not free. They are products of a healthy environment. Forests are lungs. Open land is a water filter. I love ya, Rush, but on this issue you’re just not thinking hard enough.

Legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno won 409 genuine college games. No one can take that away from him, the players, the team staff, or the proud PSU alumni, like me.

Child molester Jerry Sandusky is a scumbag, but the football program had zero to do with his crimes. But it was the football program the NCAA punished, disproportionately to any other football program in American history. Using Sandusky’s association (not employment) with the PSU football program, and Louis Freeh’s horrendously unprofessional report (analyzed in detail on this site) to support its blitzkrieg assault on Penn State, the NCAA coerced PSU trustees and incompetent, spineless top PSU staff to sign the consent decree that unfairly punished the football program.

Enter the courts, where facts actually can matter. And thus we have courts that are correctly beginning to cast doubts on the entire NCAA punishment of PSU football. This week a court held that further inquiry is necessary to determine if the NCAA not only operated consistent with its own charter, but also consistent with the facts of the Sandusky case vis-a-vis PSU football.

Daylight is seeping in, and I do not believe that the NCAA will survive the exposure, or the application of basic logic and rules of fairness.

Joe Paterno, my hero, had 409 Wins to his credit. Those wins remain, no matter what, but hopefully they will soon be reinstated after basic due process for ALL of the victims of Sandusky’s crimes.

The federal government is over-reacting, as usual, tossing cows off of long-time federal grazing land in Arizona, as it is now magically no good for grazing.

Apparently desert tortoises never got along with huge buffalo, which look and weigh a lot like cattle…but wait…the tortoises did get along with the buffalo. So it is tough to see what the US government needs to do this for.

It is certainly another Obama attack on self-reliant rural Americans.

It is certainly another opportunity for hopped-up federal agents to play cowboy with American citizens in their gunsights. They set up “First Amendment Zones” that are ridiculous to see, and they are arresting people trying to document how many valuable cattle (beef is at an all-time high now) the government stormtroopers are taking away.

It is a bad situation, like Ruby Ridge and Waco were unnecessarily bad situations.

You know what should happen? A posse of militia should go out there and throw the federal agents off the land. Have an armed stand-off. Show this heavy-handed government that we, the people, are not going to take it any more.

Liberals used to be intellectuals. They were people who thought things through, applied logic to stodgy old taken-for-granted conventional wisdom, and had new ideas as a result.

Then Political Correctness struck. A laundry list of politically correct things to say and believe arrived, and liberals stopped analyzing, stopped thinking.

Instead, liberals sought to impose that politically correct list on every person, business, institution, and place they could reach. Soon enough, liberals had captured academia, most foundations, and the media. And soon enough, those outlets began replicating the same old politically correct list of issues.

Being a liberal became a quest for power, for domination, for absolute control, so that The List could be imposed without debate. Debate became a shallow game: Mockery, sarcasm, a few dismissive remarks, and then the discussion is over.

And that is how liberals forgot how to think.

Making it worse is that liberals today are surrounded by a cocoon of academic and media sources that tell them over and over that they are right and politically correct. That these sources cannot win a fair fight in the market place of ideas, and instead resort to brute force from the get-go, should alert any thinking person that there is a problem.

Here in central Pennsylvania, a few years ago PennFuture tried to get a local weather man fired because he did not repeat the politically correct mantra on “global warming.” That’s right, they tried to fire him, silence him, punish him for his views, and thereby intimidate others who might share his views. The same thing has happened with Brendan Eich at Mozilla, Chautauqua Institution, and at countless other places. The mainstream media (ABCCBSNBCNPRMSNBCNYTWPLATimes etc.) is incredibly transparent in their partisan activism.

PennFuture, Mozilla, and Chautauqua Institution are not alone, nor are their actions brand new for liberal politics. But they do spell the end of liberal intellectualism, whereby leftists once sought to persuade others with logic and facts. Those days are long gone.

If you are a liberal today, I feel sorry for you. You have my sympathy, because you have forgotten how to think, especially for yourself.

Religious freedom is specifically protected in the US Constitution’s First Amendment. It is one of the hallmarks of American liberty, one of our claims to fame.

Enter liberalism AKA fascism.

If you are Brendan Eich, founder of Mozilla, and you believe in the Bible and you vote that way, and you donate money to causes and candidates who represent that view, why…you are FIRED. Yes, fired for your religious and political views.

If you are Elaine Huguenin of Elaine Photography in Albuquerque, New Mexico, you are now in violation of a state law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual behavior. So Elaine was sued because she didn’t want to photograph a gay wedding. Our super lame US Supreme Court refused to stand up for Elaine’s rights.

Wedding cakes for same-sex couples have also become cause celebre.

So apparently it is now against the law to believe in the Bible, to follow the Bible, and to follow your religious conscience. It appears that it is now illegal to be against gay behavior. And it appears that you can be fired for being insufficiently supportive of gay behavior. Is it against the law to be against gay behavior?

My question is, Can a gay baker be compelled to make a birthday cake for an anti-gay activist? Like, say, anti-gay Westboro Baptist members?

Like so much of this issue, the whole thing stinks to high heaven of double standards. Tolerance for one should be tolerance for all. First Amendment rights are clearly under attack by the very fascists who proclaim themselves to be the most tolerant and open minded of all.

American rights are being lost, and I will keep beating on this dead horse, until it gets up and starts running like it used to. Giddy up!

There is no such thing as a “collective” right in the American liberties enumerated in our Constitution.

If you think otherwise, you really must study the Constitution more. Local to the Harrisburg area is an organization that provides classes on Constitutional issues: http://reclaimliberty.com/

The “collective right” idea was ginned up out of thin air in the 1970s by anti-freedom activists. The US Supreme Court has rejected it twice, and there is not an honest scholar anywhere who believes in it.

The Bill of Rights is exactly that – a list of individual rights and liberties that belong to American citizens. No one can take them away. Whether you choose to exercise those rights, or not, is your choice.

A big Thank You to the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference organizers, its speakers and moderators, and the hundreds of attendees who are taking time out of their days, livelihoods, and family commitments to gather together and work on rebuilding American and Pennsylvanian liberties.

I got a lot out of it today. Big Thank You to PA state senator Mike Folmer, whose passionate advocacy for individual liberties inspires so many other citizens to work twice as hard. Even those who disagree with the traditionalist movement respect the commitment we have to protecting EVERYONE’S rights, the opposite of the Left, which is constantly undermining civil liberties.

If you want to see how effective “Gun Free” zones are, look at Fort Hood, now the scene of yet another massacre. This time, a deranged Soldier took advantage of disarmed military staff, and killed them in cold blood. He also wounded many more, before killing himself. All of his victims were disarmed, by Pentagon policy. Seems that the US military expects its staff to bear arms abroad, and to go unarmed at home. Why a serviceman cannot carry a sidearm on base is beyond my understanding. It makes no sense, and leaves our personnel at risk.

Gun Free zones are wishful thinking. Without the ability to stand and fight, everyone in a Gun Free zone is a sitting duck. Whoever came up with this idea is a fool.